There was no studio and no plan. There was a phone propped against a water jug, and two people praying the way they prayed every evening anyway.
The setup, such as it was
The phone leaned against a jug because we had nothing to mount it on. The light was whatever was in the room. We did not rehearse, because it had not occurred to us that a Rosary was something one rehearsed.
If you go back and watch that first recording you can hear the house in it. We have never been tempted to take that out.
Who it was for
Our parents. That is the entire answer.
They were shut in, half a world away, and the daily Rosary that had held those households together for forty years had stopped being possible in company. We recorded one so they could pray along with us at their own hour.
What we did not do
We did not tell anyone outside the family it existed. We did not share it beyond the people it was made for. We have never, in the years since, promoted a single video.
I mention this not as modesty but as evidence. Everything that followed came from someone deciding, unprompted, that another person needed to hear it.
The letters
Within a month strangers were writing. They had found it, prayed it, and passed it on — and a number of them said they had prayed it with their own mothers, which was precisely why we had made it in the first place.
That was the point at which we understood we had not solved a family problem. We had answered a question a great many people had been asking quietly.
Still the same table
The mission now runs to over ten thousand videos in more than ten languages, and there is proper equipment involved these days.
But the decision that mattered was made at a kitchen table by two people who thought they were doing something very small, and I would not want anyone reading this to conclude that they need better equipment before they begin.